Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
“I did not read The Hobbit or the The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a child, and I have always felt a bit alienated from the fandom surrounding them,” Konigsberg observes.
Now I think I know why: Tolkien seems to have wiped women off the face of Middle-earth. I suppose it’s understandable that a story in which the primary activity seems to be chopping off each other’s body parts for no particular reason might be a little heavy on male characters — although it’s not as though Tolkien had to hew to historical accuracy when he created his fantastical world. The problem is one of biological accuracy. Tolkien’s characters defy the basics of reproduction: dwarf fathers beget dwarf sons, hobbit uncles pass rings down to hobbit nephews. If there are any mothers or daughters, aunts or nieces, they make no appearances. Trolls and orcs especially seem to rely on asexual reproduction, breeding whole male populations, which of course come in handy when amassing an army to attack the dwarves and elves.
Yes, yes, as she admits, Tolkien’s few female characters tend to be powerful. But that hardly changes the basic fact that the Hobbit, and Tolkien generally, is overloaded with dudes.
These fairly commonplace observations have, naturally, sent the orcs and the elf princesses of the Men’s Rights subreddit into an uproar. Naturally, none of them seem to have bothered to read any of Konigsberg’s brief piece before setting forth their opinions, which sometimes accuse her of ignoring things she specifically acknowledged (like that whole powerful-female-character thing), and completely miss that the bit about reproduction is, you know, a joke on Konigsberg’s part.
Here are some of my favorite idiotic comments from the “discussion.” (Click on the yellow comments to see the originals on Reddit.)
Uh, Jane Austen’s books are filled with dudes. Especially Pride and Prejudice 2: Mr. Darcy’s Revenge, which was later adapted into a buddy cop movie starring Robin Williams and Danny Glover.
EDITED TO ADD: Somehow forgot to include two of my favorite comments:
Oh, and if you were unable to find a woman in the picture above, try this one instead:
See, a more reasonable person would resent the person the other guys rather than the women who prefer men who’re handsome/charming/not boiling over with rage towards women to the point where any woman who encounters them wants to run away.
You’d think that, with their failure to view women as people, they’d blame men MORE. Even children tend not to blame the fire truck for the other kid choosing not to share. In a way, I wonder if it demonstrates that they understand women are people, but can’t complete the thought. Thus, they don’t blame the men because women are not toys, but then they stop thinking and all the resentment just falls on women.
I think the best way to sum up their mindset would be to say that they know that women are people with free will but wish that we weren’t and resent us for it.
That’s probably more true for the MRAs, but I think a lot of more casual misogyny is due to just not thinking it through. At least, it gives me hope that feminism can reach more men. Most MRAs aren’t going to let common sense get in the way of their rage-resentment-pity party.
Most guys who go through a “damn women for having free will and being able to decide not to have sex with me!” stage grow out of it. If they discover either the MRM or PUA at that point they probably never will, though.
What About the Moonz:
hate how Tolkien gets excused for not writing women characters because he felt he didn’t understand them, but he could understand IMAGINARY FUCKING SPECIES.
That’s like saying everyone has to be white for historical accuracy.
The species he imagined were, as you point out, imaginary and therefore could not be offended or hurt by bad portrayal. Obviously women can, so what would be prefferable, writing them badly or not writing them at all? Personally, I feel that the choice is the writer’s and that if people don’t like it they can always vote with thier feet and go and find something they do like. I quite understand that in the light of modern attitudes Tolkien is both sexist and racist but do we jettison the work of all writers who don’t measure up to today’s moral standards? Should we not be reading Shakespeare because of his racism, or listening to Wagner because of his proto-Nazi attitudes? Lots of people here seem to enjoy reading H.P Lovecraft who’s writings were notoriously racist and ableist (to say nothing of his odd ideas about geometry), are they wrong in reading and enjoying his work?
I’m not sure what exactly you’re advocating here.
@Seranvali:
How to be a fan of problematic things.
If you haven’t read that already, you might consider giving it a scan.
Rule one: acknowledge it, and make no apologies for it.
Tolkien was able to research many things to get the details exactingly right. He could easily have researched writing believable female characters and got it right. He didn’t make it a priority.
It doesn’t mean we have to burn all his writings in acid. It means it has problems. It means we don’t gloss over them.
Not to drag him over the coals, but to remind people writing NOW that we expect better of THEM. To remind people reading him for the first time that while he was good at some things, that doesn’t make him perfect. To avoid perpetuating the very same mistakes.
@Howardbann1ster
THIS so much! You can like Wagner’s music, but you can’t deny the fact that he was a favorite of the nazis.
Also, it means that if we decide to film books that were written in a less enlightened time now there’s no reason that we can’t update some bits to be more in line with current attitudes, especially if we’re already making changes to the plot.
Sure. FIlm makers take horrible liberties with their source material all the time, we might as well make some positive changes once in a while.
What do they teach in high school that what howardbann1ster so eloquently said needs to be said?
If I hadn’t already known it, I would have learned it when we covered “The Merchant of Venice.”
Also, to add to howardbann1ster:
Plus, he’s dead, he can take it. (If he were alive, he should answer for it.)
@Seranvali: Look, 95 % of Tolkien’s characters or something like that are male. Not a 100 %. As I said before, I like the few female characters he do write. Apparently he felt uncomfortable writing women, but it’s obvious he wasn’t incapable of doing so, since some female characters are there.
So he could just have added more of them.
That STILL doesn’t mean the books are bad, or that you can’t like them if you’re a feminist or whatever. I love Tolkien, as do many other people in this thread. It’s just that there’s a problem with his books that one’s gotta be allowed to point out.
Awwwwww, the ol’ “I know you are, but what am I?” That’s precious. Been sitting on that comeback a while, haven’t you? That’s adorable.
Also, really, AGAIN with the “either make your own or shut up” whinge? I’m not going to bother repeating myself (that there already have been women creating the media we’ve said we’d like to see more of, or that it’s stupid to expect that people can just change something without criticizing it) but seriously, do you tell other movie critics to shut up and make their own movies? Was your response to Ebert after he called Battlefield Earth the blah it was “create your own media!” Or did you say to his review of Showgirls, “You aren’t the target audience anyway obviously!”
But I guess crotchety old white dudes get to comment on and criticize everything without creating their own media because duh, they’re the target audience for EVERYTHING.
Howard:
My problem is, when I get right down to it I feel really guilty for loving LotR, almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, Lovecraft’s weird stories, some of Neil Gaiman’s “comics” and novels, Game of Thrones, quite a lot of music (a lot of Jackson Browne’s later stuff, for example) and the only way I feel I can deal with this is to get rid of them. I don’t know how many times I’ve thrownbooks I love and deleted music that had helped me through all sorts of crises because I felt I couldn’t be a feminist and tolerate them. And not just individual books or songs but everything a particular author or musician ever wrote. My Jackson Browne collection ran to hundreds of songs, cds, rare bootleg recordings, jam sessions with other artists and political music, and it really hurt deleting them but I felt that was part and parcel of my feminist belief system.
I know these things are bad. I understand that a lot of the things I really love are, in modern moral terms completely unacceptable but I have to keep on destroying them because liking these things makes me a total hypocrite. The only way I can keep any of this stuff is because if I look at the context I can see where they’re coming from and realize that our culture has changed and look at it in an historical or anthropological light but that doesn’t work with a lot of it because it’s contemporary.
There has to be a better way of dealing with this. I went to see The Life of Pi this afternoon and for most of the movie it was about a single teenage boy stuck in a lifeboat with a tiger. Am I being hypocritical by saying I really enjoyed it? One of the things that got me through my recent chemotherapy was an anime that’s problematic but deleting it was really difficult. I was depressed for days afterwards because it had really lifted my spirits during a terrible time.
The article you linked to was helpful in that the writer said that but it hasn’t wrong to watch these things as long as you acknowledge it and point it our when you see it but it doesn’t deal with the root of the problem, that I sometimes enjoy things that in some way are contrary to my values and this kind of discussion makes me feel even worse.
Let me tell you about Terry Goodkind.
I adored Terry Goodkind. I loved Terry Goodkind. I bought every single one of his books.
I hate Terry Goodkind with the fiery hatred of a million suns.
I think I’m going to burn his books. It’s a nice symbolic gesture, and it’s going to make me feel a whole hell of a lot better.
That’s EASY. That line is plain. Terry Goodkind, once you see through him, has written things that are not only not-that-well-written but are straight-up arguing in favor of genocide. Terry Goodkind’s books are so far beyond the pale that I can’t believe I own all of them.
—
I got the latest book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series recently.
That’s not so easy.
Pieces of it are problematic. The gender essentialism. The way he treats gay characters. The treatment of race. It’s not HATEFUL… but it is just a bit condescending.
…
I’m not sure what to do with it either. I start with what I said before; I won’t excuse authors I like, or pretend they don’t have problems. What problems they have, we don’t want to allow to continue.
Where do I cut them off? When does a book hit the trash can?
—
I dunno. Some of it is obviously personal. Some of it has larger political implications–I don’t want the bigots to think I support them, and if giving an author support tells them that, I won’t, no matter how good he was.
—
But I still have Scott Pilgrim on my shelf, problems and all.
And Neil Gaiman, and Shakespeare.
For me it’s just a gut feeling of “I am not enjoying this”. As in, whatever it is that’s bothering me about that piece of work is bothering me so much that it’s no longer possible for me to put that aside and enjoy the rest of the work for its good points.
LOTR doesn’t even come close to hitting that point for me. An example of a series of books that eventually did hit that point would be Pern. At a certain point there was just too much shit that bothered me piling up for me to enjoy reading those books any more.
We’ve moved on a bit and I sympathize completely with the “Should I just jettison it all?” dilemma, but I just wanted to address this.
The trouble is twofold: First, it encourages laziness by making “I’m bad at it, so I just won’t do it” an acceptable option. Say you’re really bad at maps and designs. It wouldn’t be fine to throw them out the window and have the house facing north in one scene and south in the next; that’s bad writing. If you’re bad at maps, that just means you’ll have to make a more concerted effort to make sure everything’s location is consistent. So too with writing women.
Second, if that’s an option, people are always going to choose it. “Don’t even try” is always going to be more attractive and feel more natural than “do something that takes me outside my comfort zone.” And so progress will never be made.
Joe-bob: and long, long before feminism, the internet or any of all that.
yeah, those Suffragettes, sprung full-grown from the brow of Betty Friedan. No Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, no Frances Buss, no Mabel Capper, no Famous Five, nope, there was no Mary Wollstonecraft.
Feminism is a modern creation.
Bollocks.
@Cloudiah – Why would I waste an iota of my life reading an article by someone moaning about a film… of a fantasy book…. not meeting their whateverthefuck agenda?
Because you don’t want to look like a close-minded ignorant twit?
Nah… I forgot of whom I was speaking. That’s never bothered you before.
How about because that’s what people of character do before they responsd to something, they read it so they can address the issues, rather then just trumpet their blind prejudice.
But why change now.
Abnoy: Leaving aside the fact that there are literally lots and lots of series in the genre that followed that now feature and star women, what now do you want to do then, resurrect JRR Tolkien from the dead and force him to rewrite the whole series to suit you? Get his still-living son to rewrite the series then? Get a writer suitable to you to rewrite the series to be suitable for you?
Show me where anyone said that.
And the existence of those books doesn’t change the question of Tolkien’s choice to exclude women. What I think ought to be done is talk about what it means/implies about culture in general, because the question isn’t dead and gone just because Tolkien is.
That’s the thing, idiots like yourself want to pretend this all exists in a vacuum and that to talk about it is to be against the work/think the author was evil.
You are reifying “The Work”, when what we want to talk about is, “The Question”.
Because male genealogy can only be conclusively proven by tracing the path of the Y-Chromosome, which is only passed from fathers to sons in a direct line, duh. That’s why it’s so much easier to trace female genealogy.
Dude…. where was Tolkien talking about the blood tests for DNA?
Maternity is known, paternity is assumed.
Well, the discrepancy is theorized to be caused by genetic drift among fewer male lineages due to (wait for it) HYPERGAMY
The fuck? No. Hypergamy, in a non BC setting would lead to more male lineage (since a woman might be stepping out on her partner, but still might get pregnant with him).
But things like the Tokapi palace sequestered a lot of women to the sole “use” of one man.
That’s without the simple fact that all people share mitochondria, but only the male offspring get a Y chromasone. Since the mitochondria come from women, all of her offspring will have the same mitochondria.
This isn’t math, it’s fucking arithmetic.
@Abnoy and others, the whole “it’s 70 years old/the author is dead, what do you expect anyone to do?” argument is kind of irrelevant because we’re not just talking about a book from the 40’s, we’re talking about a movie that was released just last month.
And since, as every wanky Tolkein fanboy/girl has pointed out in the last few months, Peter Jackson made significant changes to the story, I think it’s perfectly valid to ask why he changed some things and not others. They might not even be significant changes! Where in the book does it say all the dwarves have light skin? Since non-dwarves can’t tell male and female dwarves apart, can we trust Bilbo’s assumption that all his traveling companions were male? A more inclusive cast would not actually be a huge deviation from the text, despite what the purists think.
“Maternity is known, paternity is assumed.” — hell, I had a civil law teacher say exactly that — “motherhood is a fact, fatherhood is a state of mind”. He was discussing how DNA testing was changing that, but, of course, Tolkien was not using DNA. So really, the paternal line would’ve had to have been based on the assumption that the unnamed mother hadn’t cheated on the named father. All adds up to some weird views on the women he couldn’t be arsed to write.
“And since, as every wanky Tolkein fanboy/girl has pointed out in the last few months, Peter Jackson made significant changes to the story, I think it’s perfectly valid to ask why he changed some things and not others. They might not even be significant changes! Where in the book does it say all the dwarves have light skin? Since non-dwarves can’t tell male and female dwarves apart, can we trust Bilbo’s assumption that all his traveling companions were male? A more inclusive cast would not actually be a huge deviation from the text, despite what the purists think.”
Seconding all of this! It’d just make sense if some of the assumptions Bilbo made had been wrong — and Tolkien even included some that were wrong, eg Bilbo’s unfounded fears about broken dishes.
“An example of a series of books that eventually did hit that point would be Pern. At a certain point there was just too much shit that bothered me piling up for me to enjoy reading those books any more.”
Totally with you there, Cassandra, and I quit reading Pern after The Skies of Pern. Apart from the sort of problematical things we’re talking about, I don’t think Anne McCaffrey could write credible villains for shit.
Sharing the Problems with Pern! I hung on a while longer, grimly, because of being such a completist and oh loving the dragons and lizards, but OMG! Had to give up on the one that was rewrite of former scenes through point of view of working class and “drudges” shudder.
I am wondering why I get my Medusa gravatar here, but not when i’m logged in on my other computer (bought a new computer last fall when I started working at home more). Will have to try to redress this beause I LURVES my Medusa.
Also, have neglected to say how much I love the title of this post: Lords of their Dingalings should so be a t-shirt or something.